The trip from Sendai to Takayama took about six and a half hours. There's a couple reasons for that: the layovers at stations and that there's no direct route to Takayama from Sendai. We had to go south to Nagoya before heading back North, albeit north-west instead of north-east to Takayama. The first part was by bullet train, while the second part was by a limited express train. The limited express train (Hida Wide View) made me reminisce about my first train ride in Japan when I was an elementary student. It was an older train in comparison to other limited express trains that I took in the past (ie: Azusa)
Once we reached Takayama, we went straight to the hotel. We were about 30 minutes before check in time, so they asked us to wait, instead of holding onto our luggage. Once we managed to check in, we headed straight to Old Town, which is the more traditional part of Takayama.
As we walked there, I noticed a lot of foreigners walking around. To this day, I'm not sure why Takayama is so popular with tourists. It's essentially a small city in Gifu with not too much to see (in my opinion, though nice and peaceful). It seemed like most of the tourists were Dutch, tough my Nederlands listening skills are horrendous.
Old Town was pretty though with a variety of traditional streets and shops. We bought some sake for our relatives (Takayama is known for their sake) and I got to try Hida beef -- a type of Wagyu. Looking for more wagyu, we looked for a Hida beef restaurant once we visited a bakery and headed back to our hotel to rest for a bit.
The Hida beef restaurant we found was filled with tourists. We waited 40 minutes or so for a table. I was ready to spend a fair bit for my meal, but to my utmost horror, I saw that we had to cook the meat ourselves. Not wanting it to be a repeat of Saga, I opted for a cheaper (still around $16 CAD) bowl of Bibimbap. There was barely any beef, but the pieces I had were really good! In a sense, I stilled had to cook my own beef because it was raw in my bowl. Nevertheless, we ate our meals, paid and left.
After dinner, we stopped by the closest 7-11 from our hotel, which was about a 10 minute walk, and stocked up on snacks and breakfast.
A busy day of travelling, but we managed to fit in some sights!
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